An epic new Star Trek saga by New York Times bestselling author Greg Cox set during the original five-year mission! The planet Vok is holding its first free elections after years of oppressive military rule. Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise have been dispatched by Starfleet to serve as impartial observers, but remaining neutral proves a challenge, as Kirk confronts a tangled web of scandal, conspiracy, and assassination plots—with the stability of an entire sector at stake. To make matters worse, Dr. Leonard McCoy has vanished while on a mission of mercy to Braco, a nearby planet only a system away. With Kirk unable to abandon his vital mission on Vok to hunt for his friend, it’s up to First Officer Spock and Christine Chapel to lead a team in search of the missing doctor, even if it means risking whatever fate befell McCoy. Unknown to his friends and crewmates, however, McCoy has been spirited away to another world, Ozalor, where he’s expected to find a cure for a mysterious ailment plaguing a member of the planet’s ruling family. Torn between his Hippocratic oath and his desire to escape, McCoy finds himself at the center of deadly palace intrigues—and a struggle for power that may ultimately consume all three worlds!

Contests are prevalent in many areas, including sports, rent seeking, patent races, innovation inducement, labor markets, scientific projects, crowdsourcing and other online services, and allocation of computer system resources. This book provides unified, comprehensive coverage of contest theory as developed in economics, computer science, and statistics, with a focus on online services applications, allowing professionals, researchers and students to learn about the underlying theoretical principles and to test them in practice. The book sets contest design in a game-theoretic framework that can be used to model a wide-range of problems and efficiency measures such as total and individual output and social welfare, and offers insight into how the structure of prizes relates to desired contest design objectives. Methods for rating the skills and ranking of players are presented, as are proportional allocation and similar allocation mechanisms, simultaneous contests, sharing utility of productive activities, sequential contests, and tournaments.

An original novel based on the thrilling new Star Trek movies! Based on the “Kelvin Universe” movie saga! Captain James T. Kirk and the Enterprise crew escort Spock’s father, Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan, to a dilithium-rich planet called Akiron. They arrive to find this world under siege by creatures that some of the planet’s denizens believe are demons. Sarek orders Kirk to abandon the mission, but the young captain won’t turn his back on people in danger. After a harrowing encounter with the dark-energy “demons,” Kirk’s belief in a rational universe is challenged by a mystic who insists that it wasn’t coincidence that brought Kirk to Akiron, but the alien equivalent of a Karmic debt. Meanwhile, aboard the Enterprise, Sarek’s young Vulcan aide L’Nel has a sinister agenda—and its chief objective appears to be the cold-blooded murder of Spock!

How has the regulation of business shifted from national to global institutions? What are the mechanisms of globalization? Who are the key actors? What of democratic sovereignty? In which cases has globalization been successfully resisted? These questions are confronted across an amazing sweep of the critical areas of business regulation--from contract, intellectual property and corporations law, to trade, telecommunications, labor standards, drugs, food, transport and environment. This book examines the role played by global institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, the OECD, IMF, Moodys and the World Bank, as well as various NGOs and significant individuals. Incorporating both history and analysis, Global Business Regulation will become the standard reference for readers in business, law, politics, and international relations.

This practical book highlights the key issues of intellectual property and ownership, genetics, biodiversity and food security. Additionally it covers negotiations in the World Trade Organization, Convention on Biological Diversity, UN Food and Agriculture Organization and various other international bodies.